Always by Nicola Griffith Read Free Book Online Page B

corrugated steel warehouse. At some point it had been painted pale blue, but now it was mostly grey and rusty orange. The docking gates down the side were shuttered. Instead of semis in the parking lot, there were two trailers with Hippoworks Productions blazoned on the sides, a couple of vans, and an assortment of SUVs, all sparkling with sunlit raindrops. This was all mine, even the puddles on the worn asphalt, gleaming with oil rainbows, but it didn’t feel like mine, and I didn’t really want it. I’d never wanted it. Once I’d sorted out the problems, I’d sell.
    NOONE checked my ID, no one even noticed as I stepped through the open rolling doors of my warehouse. I stood for a moment in the shadows by the right-hand wall.
    I had thought that stepping onto a film set would be like being dropped inside a manic depressive’s head: periods of frantic activity punctuated by stressful, motionless silence as cameras rolled, followed by people rushing around setting up the next scene, with perhaps the occasional diva- or director-style tantrum to relieve the tedium. Here, the atmosphere reminded me of watching a road crew set up in an arena on the sixtieth stop in a world tour, or riggers raising the traveling circus’s big top: purposeful and brisk, with just the hint of a swagger, experts saying with their bodies and their competence, This is our world.
    Forty or so people did not come close to filling the space, which was bigger than I’d expected, and more than fifty feet high in the center. In the far left corner, carpenters sawed and hammered; in another, two middle-aged men with paint-spattered clothes said something to a woman in a white coat at a makeshift counter, who was brushing back her mid-blond hair with her wrist. I hung a tag on the woman. A man and woman were walking with loaded plates over to a woman who presided over what looked like piles of Goodwill clothes. One man jumped off a platform about fifteen feet high onto an inflated bag that made a gassy whoosh, and then rolled off and started climbing back up to the platform while air compressors thumped. At the far end, in a blaze of lights, about two dozen people crouched behind cameras and cranes and dollies—they seemed to have adapted some of the decades-old rail tracks inset in the floor—or paced out marks, while a worried-looking man with glasses checked and rechecked snaking cables and a control board. Two men were lifting something from a box and onto the pile of old clothes. I hung a tag on them, too. There were monitor screens everywhere, even by the entrance and food counter; people glanced at them reflexively every so often. Something squawked over my head: a speaker on a makeshift shelf nailed to a joist. No one yelled Lights! or Camera! or Action!
    I went back to the two men. One of them, slim and cocky as a flamenco dancer, had turned to say something to a woman dismantling an arc light, but the other was looking in my direction, and it was immediately clear why my subconscious had told me he didn’t fit. He had dark hair and a bony face—the kind of face teenage boys develop during their first major growth spurt. I doubted he was even sixteen, far too young to be on a film set. An anomaly, but not a danger.
    The woman in the white coat was the caterer. She said something to the two men with the paint-spattered clothes that made them laugh, then pointed with a big knife to a platter of sandwiches, and went back to chopping. Perhaps it was the big knife that had flagged my attention. It shouldn’t have. My subconscious should have put the knife and the coat and the food together and given me the green light. I watched a little longer, but she just kept chopping, and she chopped like a caterer. No threat there.
    Now people began to glance at me: quick flicking looks. Perhaps it was the suit. But they were obviously used to strangers. No one came over to find out who I was.
    After a while, a pattern emerged: the woman with the heap of